And, so, another festival draws to a close. Yesterday, TIFF handed out its trophies for 2012, and you can read about all the winners here. Much to my surprise – and, seemingly, the genuine shock of many a TIFFgoer – the Audience Award was claimed by David O. Russell’s The Silver Linings Playbook, a film …
And, so, another festival draws to a close. Yesterday, TIFF handed out its trophies for 2012, and you can read about all the winners here. Much to my surprise – and, seemingly, the genuine shock of many a TIFFgoer – the Audience Award was claimed by David O. Russell’s The Silver Linings Playbook, a film …
Last year, I ended my TIFFing on a meh note. This year, though my ratio of great films to mediocre films favors the latter category more than it did in 2011, I nonetheless once again concluded my fest-going with a film that didn’t quite wow me as much as I’d hoped it would. Perhaps I …
On occasion at TIFF, if you’re lucky, you’ll see something that defies description. Sometimes, it’s a film that is so breathtakingly fantastic that it seems impossible to find the words to accurately convey to anyone unfortunate enough to have missed it how amazing it is; sometimes, it’s a movie so bizarre and confounding that, likewise, …
One of my favourite things about TIFF is the ability it affords cinephiles to discover, and then follow the careers of, international talent whom we might not otherwise get a chance to see at work, be they actors or directors. Many years ago, I saw a film at the festival called The White Masai and …
Sooner or later at every TIFF, it happens. After a string of good-to-great movies, and just when I start to think maybe I’ve lucked out and chosen nothing but winning films, my streak comes to an end – sometimes abruptly (i.e., I get up and walk right out of the theater halfway through the screening …
Many of the films at TIFF – this year and every year, for that matter – tend to be of the Heavy or Serious or Important variety; movies that may leave you shaken or angry or depressed or downright queasy by the time you walk out of the theater and back out into the real …
As I’ve mentioned in previous years, sometimes I purposely choose films of a given theme on a festival day, and sometimes it’s just a coincidence that I wind up attending screenings that share some kind of common thread. The latter was the case yesterday, as I wound up with two very different movies about teenagers. …
Though this was only my second day of TIFFing, it was the fourth day of the festival, and I’d been hearing a few accounts of ticketing snafus at the various venues, movies starting up to an hour late and general unpleasantness when arriving for screenings. My day-one experience at the Bader had been pretty close …
There’s something comforting about the arrival of the Toronto International Film Festival, and settling in to my first screening of the fest, each September. Despite all its accompanying aggravation and frustration and run-ins with clueless newbie volunteers, TIFF comes with a weird familiarity that, for me, is like slipping on your favorite cozy sweater after …